US schools teach that Hamas and Hezbollah are "political parties"

A Department of Education textbook claims that Hamas and Hezbollah are legitimate political parties, leading to outrage from parents

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Taking a leaf out of the European Union textbook, one school district in Tennessee in the United States has come under fire after teaching its students that terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah are legitimate "political parties".

A number of parents in the district are reported to be outraged over a textbook distributed in high schools in the “human geography” class. The book suggests that that suggest Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO are political parties, making little mention of their terrorist activities.

One statement from the 10th edition of “The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography” textbook was most alarming to one of the parents, Hugh Nemets. It reads:

“If a Palestinian suicide bomber kills several dozen Israeli teenagers in a Jerusalem restaurant, is that an act of terrorism or wartime retaliation against Israeli government policies and army actions?”

Nemets told Nashville's News 2 channel, “It smells of anti-Semitism to me. It opened the door to legitimizing terror."

One review of the book on Amazon reads, "The author has a clear anti-Western and anti-Israeli bias. Any teacher or professor who willingly selected this as an "unbiased" source from which to teach should seriously think about what they are teaching their students."